Resiliency

Major tragedies like Typhoon Haiyan, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and earthquakes
in Japan, Pakistan and Haiti are a wake up call to prompt designers that we always need to keep
the long-term picture in mind when we design, making buildings to resist possible disasters as
well as more ordinary long-term wear and tear. While the term sustainability in todays lexicon
often conjures up an image of CFLs, Priuses and low carbon emissions, sustainability literally
means to endure. Any so-called green products and buildings that dont pass the test of time
are not truly sustainable. As climate change turns our attention to the possibility of increasingly
likely disaster scenarios, resilient design serves to remind us to design for durability over time.

flooding in Grand Rapids, MI, photo courtesy of GRNow.com

So What Does Resilient Design Entail When It Comes to Building?
To design a building with resiliency means to start the design process by thinking
carefully about the typical use scenarios of the building, common points of stress due to normal
use, as well as the most likely disaster situations in the environment that could challenge the
integrity of the building and/or endanger its occupants. The local environment always plays a
critical role in determining the factors that make a building resilient or not, and so resilient
design is always locally specific.

Resiliency in Commercial Building Design

Most of the talk about resilient design these days is generally in the context of
residential buildings and community infrastructure (such as how New York City can engineer to
protect itself against the next major storm surge from a disaster like Hurricane Sandy). What is
unfortunate is that in all the discussion surrounding resilient residential buildings and city-wide
infrastructure, non-residential buildings are too often overlooked. Examples like Hurricane
Sandy show us that more resilient structures are hugely important when it comes to health,
safety, and comfort within a city. For example, if the Con Edison power plant that exploded on
14th Street in lower Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy had had higher flood barrier walls
and had generally been better designed to withstand flooding all of lower Manhattan would
not have lost power for the 4 days that followed Hurricane Sandy, leading to widespread
evacuations, hospital evacuations, and public transportation failure. Similarly NYU Langone
Hospital and Bellevue Hospital in Manhattans East side would not have been so devastated,
requiring the emergency evacuations of thousands of patients, had they also been better designed
to withstand flood waters from a storm surge.

Emergency Resiliency & Disaster Preparedness

So how can we build resiliency into commercial buildings? The first step is to consider
all possible and likely disaster scenarios, as well as all sources of general everyday stress, and
then start the design process with all of these considerations in mind.
Seismic Considerations
Seismic testing can be used on components of buildings, model representations, and even
entire buildings at actual scale to determine their resilience in withstanding earthquakes. A
common way to test the seismic resilience of a design is to use a Shake Table. This is a
rectangular platform which is coupled to hydraulic motion actuators to shake the platform in
different ways and therefore, test structural models or building components with a wide range of
simulated ground motions, including reproductions of recorded earthquakes time-histories.

Earthquake building damage in Santiago, Chile, earthquake damage, Chilean earthquake

Extreme Heat & Cold
The same types of passive design strategies that can be employed in homes to make them super
energy efficient and green, can also be used in commercial buildings to result in everyday energy
savings as well as life-saving natural heating and cooling options in a disaster situation without
access to electrical power (and therefore mechanical HVAC). For example, if electricity is
knocked out due to a flood or earthquake, or even if there is just a common blackout, an allglass office building can quickly become like an oven on a hot summer day, potentially risking
the health and lives of occupants inside. Proper insulation, natural ventilation with operable
windows, solar shading devices, and employing stack ventilation can help buildings remain
comfortable for inhabitants even when there is no mechanical heating and cooling available.
Fire Resistance
Fire is a danger as old as architecture itself as long as humanity has had buildings, weve
faced the threat of them catching fire. Most building code adequately addresses common fire
hazards with mandatory fire-resistant stairwells, fire-resistant building materials and proper
escape methods, but these days we also need to plan carefully to address fires caused by
earthquakes, lightning and other natural disasters. In addition to urban fire hazards, wildfires are
a growing threat in the Western United States, and steps that can be taken to protect commercial

buildings against wildfire include fire-resistant landscaping, brush-clearing, and barrier zones in
wildfire prone areas.

Schiestlhaus photo by DI Wilhelm Hofbauer

Everyday Resiliency & Normal Wear and Tear

Now that weve scared you with our focused look at natural disasters, lets get back to the facts
of day-to-day life. On average, a commercial building has a lifespan of 73 years (Source: 2010
Buildings Energy Data Book, US DOE), meaning over almost a century, many commercial
structures will see millions of human feet trudging through its spaces. Truly resilient buildings
need to not just withstand natural disasters, but they need to last through years of constant,
unremitting use. So how do you make a building last longer? Designers need to build in day-today durability with tight building envelopes and long-lasting, low-maintenance interior finishes.

New York Magazines Famous Iwan Ban photograph of a blacked-Out NYC after Hurricane
Sandy
In Conclusion
As weve explored in this article, resilient design is a complex and many-faceted paradigm that
involves long-term thinking about worst-case disaster scenarios, as well as more common,
everyday wear. Though the variables which contribute to resilience are many, and often
complicated the larger lesson is simple: buildings need to be resilient in order to be truly
sustainable. Photovoltaics and low-flow toilets are not enough for sustainability a building
needs to be able to stand the test of time. As architect Carl Elefante once said, The greenest
building is the one thats already built, so our goal should be, as architects, to design buildings
that last longer than we do.
Source:
Resilient Design: Is Resiliency The New Sustainability
http://inhabitat.com/resilient-design-is-resilience-the-new-sustainability/